The luminaries have finally replied eight months later with a whole shotgun load of blame saying essentially “it wasn’t us,” blamingeverything from “the psychology of denial” to low interest rates making borrowing cheap, to a "feelgood factor" to a foreign savings glut, to a sea of debt. It’s “complex,” they say – code for “beats the hell out of us.”

Because they never actually answer the question, which was 'Why did none of you notice it?’ Because to answer that they would have had to admit to the failure of their science.

The best they can offer is to conclude,

"the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole."

Which still leaves open the question: Why did so many bright people suffer such a drastic failure of “collective imagination”? What is that if not a tacit acceptance that the leading theories of your science have failed – that your bright people have been pursing economic dead ends?